Battery recycler Li-Cycle prepares for ‘big opportunity and challenge'

In the five years since Li-Cycle was created, the battery recycling company has rapidly expanded to include four commercial plants and one hub. But as the rate of electric vehicle production ticks up, its current operations will look like a trial run, said Ajay Kochhar, Li-Cycle's CEO and co-founder.

"Imagine a future that's fully electric or majority electric. That is a big, big opportunity and challenge. We're already thinking there," he said. Over the next few decades, "the orders of magnitude will just continue to grow."

As automakers scale EV production, battery recycling will become a key piece of the supply chain. Used-battery volume is too low to create much recycling demand today, but that will change soon, said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst at Guidehouse Insights.

"A decade from now, that won't be the case," Abuelsamid said. "They need to build up that capacity fairly soon."

Just four years ago, some of the industry doubted that battery cells developed with recycled materials could match those made with virgin metals. Battery recyclers have since overcome much of that skepticism.

"They don't lose any of their effectiveness once you reprocess it and purify it again," Abuelsamid said. "You basically have the same thing you would have had if you extracted it from the ground."

Batteries can be assembled with recycled materials at a lower cost than with virgin materials, and recycling shrinks the carbon footprint of battery manufacturing, Kochhar said.

"The overall environmental footprint coming from recycled product is way, way, way lower than having to dig it out of the earth in a complicated supply chain," Kochhar said. "The world has changed 180 degrees on perception around recycling."

Li-Cycle in May partnered with General Motors with a goal of recycling up to 100 percent of the scrap from battery cell manufacturing. Ninety-five percent of the cobalt, nickel, lithium, graphite, copper, manganese and aluminum from GM's next-generation Ultium batteries can be used in new batteries or for adjacent industries.

The range and efficiency of recycled batteries should be similar to, if not better than, batteries made from virgin materials, Kochhar said.

"The impurities that cause issues sometimes from the virgin source have been already worked out in the system," he said.

Recycling the batteries and reusing their parts simplifies and streamlines manufacturing, Kochhar said.

The elements needed for future batteries already exist in used batteries, so rather than pull materials from multiple supply chains, battery-makers can rely mostly on one value stream that's already been purified, he said.

"When you're digging ore out of the ground, or pumping something out of a brine in the case of lithium, there are a lot of impurities," he said. "What we're getting is already very refined, and those impurities that tend to be problematic are already very low."

Li-Cycle developed a spoke and hub model that takes in lithium ion batteries and battery production scrap from four regional commercial spokes in the U.S. and Canada. It separates the battery materials into three streams: plastics, metals and a black mass of cathode-anode material that contains key battery components, such as lithium and cobalt.

"It's kind of like we're rebuilding or remaking the bricks to the house. We're isolating those and reselling the fundamental building blocks," Kochhar said.

The black mass goes to the company's hub in Rochester, N.Y., where Li-Cycle extracts lithium carbonate, cobalt sulphate, nickel sulphate and manganese carbonate from it.

As Li-Cycle expands, it plans to add spokes within about 200 miles of battery cell plants.

"I've seen instances of batteries going from Brazil to Belgium," Kochhar said. "Our spokes overcome that by getting close to the sources."

The cathode-anode isn't reused as is because today's battery chemistry is too variable, Kochhar said. The industry continues to evolve cathode technology to make it more efficient.

"By making the lithium, the nickel, the cobalt, the fundamental bricks essentially, they always have a market," Kochhar said. "They are agnostic on the way in and agnostic on the way out."

As EV production and adoption rises, an influx of used batteries could head to Li-Cycle and its competitors. The landscape of battery recyclers likely will expand with startups and automaker-supplier partnerships over the next decade, Abuelsamid said.

Li-Cycle is preparing for the coming flood of business.

"We definitely have the technology and the propensity to make it happen, but this needs cross-supply-chain cooperation," Kochhar said.

Sourcing raw materials will continue to be necessary, Kochhar said. But in the next 15 or 20 years, he believes recycled materials will make up the majority of battery supply.

"Once it's in that battery pack, you keep it in the chain. You get back to the fundamental materials, and you put it right back into the new batteries," Kochhar said. "That is the total priority of all participants in the supply chain."